Cybervirus essay

From: vanessa@vancam.demon.co.uk (Vanessa Campbell)
Subject: Cybervirus Essay - from before I found this group
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 04:00:31 GMT
Shortly before I gave-up christianity [sometime in the 1970s], I said to a
philosopher friend and mentor that I had come to feel that looking at the
world from a christian point of view had come to seem like forcing myself to
look at things through a distorting lens, like the adaptive system of a
schizophrenic, and that the world made just as much sense, if not more, when I
put down the lens or looked around it. I was worried about losing my belief
and asked for his help. He said that there was no way to prove which way of
looking at things was the true one and that I had to rely on my own judgement.
This was very honest of my friend because he was a devout christian. On my way
home, I decided that I must be honest with myself and dicarded christianity. I
had a wonderful feeling of joy; like an emotional bath. It was as though a
black lingering thundercloud had just vanished away. I had a pagan type
spiritual experience at the same time that will not be of interest in this
group but amounted to a "divine" comment: At last that's over.
I began to develop the idea that christianity is a communicable form of
schizophrenia. I found much support for this idea from reading and after
satisfying myself that I was right, I did not bother thinking it often until I
heard a lecture on mind viruses. In January 1992, I wrote this:

MIND VIRUSES - MIND VIRUS - PSYCHOVIRUS - CYBERVIRUS

Concept of the 1991 Royal Institution Lecturer. An idea which may be harmless
and pointless or dangerous which spreads through the media or by human contact.
Nazism; Teenage Mutant Ninger Turtles; reversed baseball hats; creationism;
christianity; other fundamentalist beliefs which obstruct clear thinking about
reality and prevent proper and appropriate action based on what really subsists
in the world. Fashions are mind viruses, some make life better some make it
worse.

I had a theory that Christianity is a communicable variety of schizophrenia
which causes the sufferer to distort reality and then act according to the
distorted world view which results. He seems to agree with me.

He had experimental evidence to prove physically that our brains use virtual
reality models of the world to understand and operate within it. Our eyes see
upside down images and interpret them. A scientist anaesthetised his eye
muscles and found that he experienced the sensations of an earthquake whenever
he moved his head. We assume a face whenever we see any pattern resembling two
eyes, a nose and a mouth. We try to make things fit our models.

I remember a report which said that when the microscope was first invented and
used to examine blood, observers failed to see the red corpuscles even though
they would have been clearly visible. It was only after somebody had postulated
that they should exist that they became visible. People tend to see only what
they expect to find. Conversely they may see what is not there if their beliefs
demand this. We should be sceptical of people seeing angels and the like
because individuals brains may provide such images when they are expected by
their virtual reality model in the given circumstances. The model or certain
aspects of a model may be shared by a group (small or worldwide) and certain
things may seem to be real to all of them whether or not these things are
believed on good evidence. The model will work almost equally well for truth
and delusion. The idea that the benzene ring was flat was held despite masses
of evidence to the contrary for many years, all because of the reputation of
the man who first said it was flat. Kekule had a real battle to get his boat &
chair conformations accepted, this because he was a young chemist with less
reputation.

Truth is the best explanation available to fit the evidence. Truth evolves. We
cling to our truths because we need to feel that we understand the world and
our selves and need to minimise uncertainty. Dogma is the enemy of truth -
whether the dogma is scientific, religious, political, artistic, philosophical
or whatever. A truth is true for as long as it works. Truths sometimes need to
be developed or discarded; sometimes they need to be reinstated. We need
working truths & working methods. Children may need simplified versions of
truths to help them get along until they can grasp a more complicated version
and incorporate this into their individual models. Simplified truths are
adequate for simple problems. Science may feel safest when it can exclude
deities and spiritual people feel safest when science has voids in its theories
but we should all look for the best model and try not to deny evidence which
demands adjustments to our models.

Psychovirus would be a useful word for things like this but cybervirus is more
useful: silly and useless and dangerous ideas can be held in a human mind and
transmitted to another by communication but they can also be stored in a
computer, on a video, in a book, etc and spread from there to other computers
and storage media (maybe published media) and maybe many human minds. The virus
exists both in minds and in computers and other storage media. Where a computer
is asked to make a decision (selection) based upon criteria involving the
cybervirus, the output will be distorted. The cybervirus can be a criterion or
group of criteria or it can be part of the data to be sorted, it may exist in
both forms.

Eg. We are told that Mars is a hostile planet incapable of supporting life in
its present condition and we believe this to be true; it probably is.
The War of the Worlds was based upon the premise that it was possible for life
to exist on Mars (generally believed at that time) and states that people from
Mars invade us and burn things up.
When the story was broadcast on US radio the citizens panicked.

However, if intelligent life had been discovered on Mars, this information
would probably be withheld from us by the "authorities" to avoid panic but also
because all people in positions of power are weasels.

****** End of original essay ******
When I found alt.memetics, I thought I had found a wonderful thing.
I thought, here's agroup of people who will have this all mapped-out,
nailed-down and analysed (subject to modifications by truer truth].
A real sense of *well-met*.
I kept downloading chunks of messages but found some very strange contaminants.
It was as though the mind-infected had found it and were fighting for the
victory of the bad memes by filling it with weird stuff and causing you to
question even the basic terminology used to get a handle on the problem.
As though Newspeak had un-worded "meme", to borrow from 1984.
I have noticed the word "semiotics" used in the group. I first met this word
in the series "Wild Palms". The Church of the Fathers was getting ready to
broadcast holographic images ["I have seen the future and it is Channel 3"]
while at the same time getting people addicted to a drug [mimosine] which made
the images tangible. They used the images to kill people who were
inconvenient. People were meeting in cyberspace in virtual bodies and there
was a fight over a "go chip". There was a resistance movement called "The
Friends". Like most good television, it probably came from the USA so most of
you probably saw it years ago, if the way we get Star Trek is anything to go
by, and have the scripts.
My dictionary gives the following:
Semiotics or semeiotics: noun functioning as singular:
1. the study of signs and symbols especially the relations between written or
spoken signs and their referents in the physical world or the world of
ideas.
2. the scientific study of disease; symptomatology
also called semiology, semeiology
[C 17: from Greek semeiotikos - taking note of signs
from semeion - a sign]
Memetics is not there yet and its meaning is in dispute in the group
Mimesis:
1. (Art and literature) the imitative representation of nature or human
behaviour
2. a. any disease that shows symptoms of another disease
b. a condition in a hysterical patient that mimics an organic disease
3. (Biology) another name for mimicry [sense 2 :-) ]
4. (Rhetoric) representation of another person's alleged words in a speech
[C 16: from Greek, from mimeisthai - to imitate]
It would seem that the cybervirus (cybernetic (control system] virus] which I
came to see [standing on others shoulders] can be more powerful than an
intellectually firmly held idea. It may be a lens you may be seeing the world
through; a virtual reality element that will not let you see the world
differently ["properly"] with your eyes, let alone your intellect. It may also
disturb a computer, for instance, during a credit check or the evaluation of a
life insurance policy application [eg. a selection criterion based on a wrong
assumption about the significance of occupation or address or genes or
lifestyle which is wrong in itself [algorithmic cybervirus]] [eg.2. bad data:
data misapplied to an individual perhaps because the information was received
from another computer which had been told bad things by a human [data
cybervirus]].
It would seem that most of you would restrict the concept of a meme to being a
piece of high fidelity information which is passed from human mind to human
mind. It may be the packing [definition] of a word. It may be a simple
[probably powerful] idea. It may be a whole religious, philosophical or
scientific belief system.
It may be a mini-program: don't trust people with
green skin; don't trust anybody over 110 YOA; check every tax demand; be
afraid if you consider going out in the dark alone; always secure all
perimeter access points before sleeping; acknowledge
the god of the portal; check you CCTV before answering the door.
It may be a belief or motto: all men/women/people/Ferengi are bastards;
all government officials are weasels; never trust anybody; speak softly but
carry a megawatt laser; don't eat hippopotamus on Wednesdays; don't leave
home without your flexible friend; do not aggravate policepeople for they are
subtle and quick to arrest you; don't drink and drive; don't post live to the
Internet when you are likely to fall asleep without disconnecting.
It could be a fixed definition of a word such as "meme".
It would be really good to agree on some terminology. I have seen the terms
"glass bead" and "button" but am not sure whether these have majority
acceptance. I understand that the term "glass bead" relates to "the glass bead
game" of which I know nothing. You cannot run a science with only one
technical term. It seems that there are different kinds of things covered by
the term meme and every time somebody tries to say something, they become a
source of contention because somebody else feels that their definition is
under threat. This may amuse those who do not care, by its being an example of
memetic conflict in action, but it doesn't get us very far in codifying the
range of things under consideration. I may be wrong and I am too tired to look
right now but it would seem that a button is a sensitivity which other people
can press/stimulate to get you behaving in a certain way. A glass bead is
perhaps a well defined item of information which you string together with
others to make a belief system - image of prayer beads such as a Roman
catholic rosary. This seems a good concept. When I was a catholic, we had to
recite a creed, a list of things which we were saying we believed in. It was a
kind of self-hypnosis {I belive this, and I believe this ......}. I could
imagine anybody with fixed beliefs going round and round their bead-string
reminding themselves of what they believed: a sort of philosophical check
list. On the other hand, one could regard it as something more positive like
the words which go to make up ones vocabulary. One could positively seek new
and useful words to string on to the collection.
First we need to decide to use any perfectly good words which already describe
what we want to say either actually or metaphorically. Eg. we have a perfectly
good word "idea". I think that it is good to protect the meanings of words and
not try to blunt their edges. They are the tools with which we think and
communicate and we need their precision to remain intact. If we are to be able
to say anything useful or convey any meaning, we must protect our wordbanks.
It would sem best to compose new ad hoc words in the traditional way by
combining classical roots until we get what we want while avoiding hijacking
combinations which have already been used for something else. This way, the
words tend to define themselves and confusion is avoided. In the film "Aliens"
[Alien 2] the word "xenomorph" is used to refer to the newly discovered
species. This would seem to mean "alien/foreign shape", but geologists have
already claimed the term "xenomorphic" to mean "not having its characteristic
crystal shape because of deforming pressure from adjacent minerals" and apply
it to mineral constituents of igneous rocks [probablty thinking "foreignly
shaped"]. "Bead" is used as a metaphor and has many meanings so another
would probably not hurt anybody. "Button" seems spot-on in describing a
control which can be pushed and may/may_not produce the desired response.
I think that the term cybervirus would be useful to denote a packet of
information which reproduces itself between hosts at I/O interfaces and is
generally damaging or useless to its hosts. If admitted by general consent, it
would become a specific flavour of meme. The hosts may be considered to
include human hosts, "thinking"/deciding machines, any information storage and
retrieval system and any (other) sentient being.
"Slogan" has also been suggested as a type of meme and would seem to be this,
without any need to redefine either "slogan" or "meme".
"Motto" would seem to be admissible for the same reasons.
"Fashion-virus" and/or "conformity-virus" may be useful to separate useless
and relatively [although following fashions can be expensive] harmless
memetic viri from the more sinister control-memes of religion. Perhaps
"marketing-virus" would be a useful sub-class of fashion-virus.
If we stick with the definition of a meme which keeps coming up in capital
letters as a basis, then weak and strong forms of this could be recognised.
This would seem to settle some of the arguments. Then the
harmless-to-malevolent axis could be explored and fitted-out with terminology,
also the liberating ...... constraining axis.
There are safety-memes, rules-of-thumb, procedural memes [including emergency
procedure memes such as those for giving first aid to the injured].
I am tired and must go to sleep. I have a client to see in 6.5 hours.
Please let me know if you think any of this useful.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
Best Wishes
Vanessa Campbell
Money is a myth!
I am a mythologist!
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

From: hingh@xs4all.nl (Marc)
Subject: Re: Cybervirus Essay - from before I found this group
Date: 8 Mar 1995 19:14:35 GMT
vanessa@vancam.demon.co.uk (Vanessa Campbell) writes:
>>I had come to feel that looking at the
>>world from a christian point of view had come to seem like forcing myself to
>>look at things through a distorting lens, like the adaptive system of a
>>schizophrenic, and that the world made just as much sense, if not more, when I
>>put down the lens or looked around it.
In that case you look at the world through a different lens, but still through
a distorting lens. (the inescapable limitations of human perception)
>>On my way
>>home, I decided that I must be honest with myself and discarded christianity.
What meme is this "I"? What memes knocked down your Christianity?
Or did it knock down itself out of precaution (Re: the d e a t h of a meme)
>>I had a pagan type
>>spiritual experience at the same time that will not be of interest in this
>>group but amounted to a "divine" comment: At last that's over.
Of course that's of interest! Highly relevant for a complete understanding of
the memes involved in your 'conversion'...
Tell us all details!
>>I had a theory that Christianity is a communicable variety of schizophrenia
>>which causes the sufferer to distort reality and then act according to the
>>distorted world view which results. He seems to agree with me.
Memetics is another good example of a communicable variety of schizophrenia.
(I suffer from it -- reality gets more and more distorted %-)
>>We should be sceptical of people seeing angels and the like
>>because individuals brains may provide such images when they are expected by
>>their virtual reality model in the given circumstances.
We should particularly be sceptical when people are seeing cyberviruses!
Vanessa's dogma:
>> Dogma is the enemy of truth -
>> I kept downloading chunks of messages but found some very strange contaminants.
What particular articles/threads are you referring to here?
If you know about memetics, how can you expect to find anything else but
contaminants?
>> It would seem that the cybervirus (cybernetic (control system] virus] which I
>> came to see [standing on others shoulders] can be more powerful than an
>> intellectually firmly held idea.
Intellectually held ideas are also viruses!
>> It may be a lens you may be seeing the world
>> through; a virtual reality element that will not let you see the world
>> differently ["properly"] with your eyes, let alone your intellect.
~~~~~~~~
Square brackets and quotes can't hide the obvious fact that you're thinking is
still hopelessly dogmatic. Your belief in the existence of 'virtual reality
elements' is as much a cybervirus, and as little a guarantee for a "proper"
world view as any other virus.
>> It would be really good to agree on some terminology. I have seen the terms
>> "glass bead" and "button" but am not sure whether these have majority
>> acceptance.
They have not.
>> It seems that there are different kinds of things covered by
>> the term meme and every time somebody tries to say something, they become a
>> source of contention because somebody else feels that their definition is
>> under threat.
That's probably because there are so many different types of memes, and
everyone has his favorite 'paradigmatic' meme. (Re: memetic diversity)
We do not need a better definition of the word meme, what we need is a better
classification of the different 'species' that exist in memespace.
>> Eg. we have a perfectly good word "idea".
We could discard the word 'meme' by just using 'idea' and add the adjective
'selfish' whenever we want to emphasize that the idea we're talking about
is a replicator.
>> "Slogan" has also been suggested as a type of meme and would seem to be this,
>> without any need to redefine either "slogan" or "meme".
We could simply say 'selfish slogan' when we want to emphasize the slogan's
replication characteristics.
>> "Motto" would seem to be admissible for the same reasons.
Okay, 'selfish motto'...
>> "Fashion-virus" and/or "conformity-virus" may be useful to separate useless
>> and relatively [although following fashions can be expensive] harmless
>> memetic viri from the more sinister control-memes of religion.
I object to this way of thinking.
If you want to study memes as a science, you should try to take a neutral,
impartial position, and not give an a priori moral judgement over any specific
meme complex.
Whether you find a meme useful or not, always depends on the memes you are
carrying. Know yourself!
>> Then the
>> harmless-to-malevolent axis could be explored and fitted-out with terminology,
>> also the liberating ...... constraining axis.
Such axis systems would be biased by the ideological colour of the one
designing them. They would have no objective relevance whatsoever.
marc
http://xs4all.nl/~hingh/